In our new educational landscape teachers have been thrust into finding new and exciting ways to keep students engaged while doing distance learning. This year (19-20) is a bit of crap shoot for that, since we as teachers didn’t have resources or training to get going on distance learning full time for the most part, we just had to go. This gave us interesting experience, I think most learned where our content weaknesses lay, we have learned where our training gaps are and finally where some of our pedagogy can be stronger. The reality of distance learning is that it won’t go away and will become part of our new routine in education. Whether this is in the face of another pandemic outbreak or students who are home-bound or have a long-term illness. While many of educators have seen this change coming down the line for some years now, it has been thrust upon us, whether we like it or not. For most of us we will have to adapt, for many they simply won’t be able to adapt and will opt to leave the profession. Those of us that continue in the field will have to take on a new portion of our teaching role and that is content creator. This time of change has taught many that while canned content can be useful, it often doesn’t have context to our classroom content and our student recognize that and ultimately disengage in our work.
What is a Content Creator?
While typically the term content creator refers to YouTubers, in a broader sense it can refer to anyone that creates content for distribution. In most ways teachers are the original content creators, it has only been the past 30 years that teachers have begun to relied on pre-made content for their classes. Often these sources of content are created from purchased class materials from book publishers. But as teachers are finding the need to have content that works specific in their classroom/project context they are turning to creating their own content. This then leads many educators down the path of learning to create higher quality content for our new online learning situations. Our students understand and recognize quality in the materials we use to teach them. We as teachers need to step-up our game in this aspect and create higher quality content and rely less on pre-made content from book publishers. While this can seem like a big task, if you take the time to learn a few new tools you can greatly improve the content that you deliver to students and it becomes much more reusable for later use in online teaching. If we think about our role as not just as teachers, but also as content creators we begin to change the landscape of what we do, our content is now given context and we can build connections and tailor content to our specific curriculum and processes. Finally when we think of ourselves (teachers) as content creators, we don’t
Types of Content for the Classroom
What types of content are we talking about in the classroom, this can be broad encompassing everything reading materials to demonstration/lecture videos. I think while teachers around the world were thrust into fully distance learning and working like crazy to scan handouts to put online this created some problems. While we can get by with this type of content, they don’t lend themselves to be worked on and submitted digitally. We as teachers need to improve our digital content creation skills and recognize what digital methods are best for different types of learning activities. An example would be if we are going to record a lecture, move away from a simple webcam video that is posted to a higher quality video with appropriate lighting and something that has structure to it. We would plan our a lecture so that the content is relevant and we have appropriate visual aids, we should be doing this with video lectures as well, especially when our students are used to watching YouTube quality videos. We must also better educate ourselves on the various tools within the LMS (Learning Management System) that we use, instead of just posting assignments with worksheets, we must think about how will this digital activity be used and what value does it give our students. This training can come from a variety of sources, both formal and informal. Continuing education and professional seminars can be a great source of introductory training, but do take time and can be expensive. As I have had to learn new technologies I one of my main sources of learning are YouTube videos. These can be a good source of task-specific skills for various pieces of software they can also be used to build larger knowledge. The hardest part of YouTube videos is finding a good series that gives you enough information to get you going and knowing what questions to ask.
